We begin today’s roundup with Michael D'Antonio at CNN on Ivanka Trump playing government at the G20:
Amid all the other craziness surrounding Donald Trump's foray onto the world stage this weekend, nothing exceeded the farcical roles assumed by his daughter Ivanka Trump — who is now, like her husband Jared Kushner, a self-styled diplomat with a heavy footprint — and her brother Donald Jr., who reprised his father's racist birtherism, this time with a retweet aimed at Sen. Kamala Harris. (Then, lacking a full measure of the old man's nerve, Jr. suddenly retreated).
Although Donald Trump Jr.'s maliciousness was shocking, it was Ivanka Trump's arrogance that was truly breathtaking. Moment by moment — from the G20 at Osaka, to a jaunt into the DMZ — she inserted herself into the middle of high-level conversations, assuming the role of equal among people with vastly greater qualifications. [...] Her father's commentary about her presence — "She's going to steal the show" — betrays much truth. This is a showbiz family, treating world affairs like a performance, and in the process making the United States look ridiculous
Matthew Zeitlin at Slate interviews former ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul on his take on why the president’s unqualified daughter should not have been in the room negotiating with world leaders:
Matthew Zetlin: As someone who has planned summits like this before, what was your initial reaction to seeing the prominent role Ivanka Trump played in Osaka and North Korea?
Michael McFaul: Well, a number of things. The summits I planned and the ones I was in charge of were with President Medvedev and President Putin and President Obama. There’s always a major contest about how many people will be in these meetings. It’s called “plus one,” “plus three,” “plus five”—there’s a big negotiation over that. In our administration, we would determine who would be in the room depending on who is involved with the policy that we were discussing. Obviously, that is not the case of the president’s daughter. I’ve been away for a while, so correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think she works on foreign policy, I don’t think she’s a member of the National Security Council. And so that just seemed rather odd to me that she would be in those meetings, even in the strained circumstances that she works in the White House—and I want to underscore that I personally think that’s an odd arrangement in and of itself—but even within that arrangement in the last two years, it’s not her portfolio to work on national security issues. I just thought it was inappropriate.
And here’s USA Today’s editorial on Trump’s North Korea policy:
To Trump, the get-together was a grand spectacle. Not only has he already become the first U.S. president to meet with a North Korean leader, he did so this time on North Korean soil, which is also a first. But he has been down this road before with little in the way of results. When Trump first met with Kim, in Singapore a year ago, he also drew the world’s attention. Then after a second meeting in Vietnam in February, the talks broke off. Now he’s at it again.
In constantly providing a stage for Kim, Trump is giving him legitimacy and global standing that he most assuredly does not deserve.
Making matters worse, Trump is, according to The New York Times, considering recognizing North Korea as a nuclear power and merely asking for it to freeze its arsenal, rather than giving it up. That’s a step back from where Kim was last year, when he promised to denuclearize.
Switching topics, Ed Kilgore explains why Trump’s efforts to the delay the Census in order to add a citizenship question run afoul of the law and Constitution:
Without question a delay in the timetable for carrying out the complex tasks associated with the census would be expensive and cumbersome. Beyond that, it’s unclear how long delays could remain compatible with the explicit constitutional mandate to complete the census by the end of 2020 [...]
In either event, if it wants to get around the courts the administration will need to come up with a better rationale than the laughable idea that it cares about voting rights enforcement. It could, of course, throw in the towel and conduct the census the same way all of its recent predecessors have done. But that wouldn’t keep America great, would it?
At The Week,
Joel Mathis calls for scraping border patrol and rebuilding the agency from scratch:
It's time to tear down the U.S. Border Patrol. And I mean tear it down entirely: Fire its staff, close its detention centers, and start over from scratch.
Why? Because new details confirm that this agency is fraught with problems. And extreme problems often require extreme solutions. [...] There has long been a growing pile of evidence that the agency's culture is saturated with racism and indifference to human life. There's no reason to believe the Border Patrol, as presently constituted, is culturally capable of handling its duties in a professional or humane fashion. This week's events should be the tipping point. It's time to dissolve the agency and start over.
And on a final note, don’t miss Joan Walsh’s latest on the concern trolling about the 2020 Democratic field:
[T]he Times has a moderation fetish. With Sunday’s astonishing six stories about the dangers of progressive politics, the paper could not make any clearer that it sees itself as the house organ of the establishment, and that its role is warning upstart Democrats not to get out of line. It is clear that the paper’s highest political priority is getting Trump out of the White House, as is proper for anyone who cares about our democracy. But its cramped conception of politics apparently makes it impossible for the paper’s leaders to envision that bold ideas and big plans might be the way to animate an anti-Trump backlash; a return to status quo liberalism is all they can imagine.
The truth is, the moderates who went running to the Times to trash progressives should spend less time worrying about the rise of Warren and Harris, and instead wonder why their policies, and their candidates, are failing to catch fire so far in this campaign season.